The Power of Love

Good health through the power of love.

I talk a lot about teamwork in the kitchen during my seminars and how couples can fight against the increasing issue of below average diets. Research tell us that only 50 percent of adults in Australia eat the recommended amount of fruit and only 10 percent eat the recommended amount of vegetables each day.

These statistics along with many others in the field of research around health and wellbeing, add up to create a situation of declining health in our communities.

Busy parents increasingly struggle to keep up the momentum of serving up healthy meals with fruit and vegetables as the heroes of the family diet.  Our lives are franticly busy; we are juggling so many time constraints.  We need to work together to reverse the trend.

At no point are you going to hear me say that it is easy to cook healthily day in day out.  I will never hand out easy to whip up 15-minute family meals, because they don’t exist. If they did exist, wouldn’t we all just roll out these 15-minute meals every night of the week and be done with it? “Dinner’s on the table kids, that was quick!” Sorry, but it’s just not real life.

I live in the real world, it takes time to prepare family meals. My partner is an HR manager for a large organisation. I am a small business owner. We are busy, just like you.  Sometimes you can find one of us after dinner just standing in front of the fridge staring at the Michael Leunig calendar that hangs there on a little love heart magnet, with its scribbles of appointments, birthdays, playdates, school events and so on.  Always glassy eyed and in a daze, we wonder if it’s the correct month we’re looking at and we are thinking to ourselves “we are about to forget a very important appointment that is coming up soon, just can’t remember what it is…”

To help each other maintain healthy diets, we need to talk about our health and wellbeing together, as a team.  We need to harness our love for life and our love for each other and bring this love into the home kitchen.

The trick to improving our diets is to support each other in preparing meals, even during the most mundane days of everyday life. If couples don’t work together, well then, the production line will collapse and shortcuts will be made.

Working together, understanding that meal preparation takes time but when it is done together is actually an act of love, it can turn the mundane into appreciation.  Like any workplace, it’s the team that pulls together to get the outcomes we are seeking.  Which, in the case of a family, is great nutritional meals and overall health for you and your kids.

So go on, this is an appointment not to be missed. Take that calendar of yours from the fridge and scribble in a date for you and your partner every Friday or Saturday that says “talk about the menu and food production for the week ahead”.

Cooking together is not only love in action, but it’s also one of the most important factors in your family’s diet.

As always happy cooking, Erik Jorgensen